Businesses currently use a variety of different methods for arranging the delivery of items and services to recipients. For example, after receiving an order from a third party, a florist may contact a person to whom flowers are to be delivered and confirm that the person will be at home at a certain time to receive the flowers. Similarly, a repair or installation service may contact a customer after receiving a certain part or product to arrange a time to install the part or product in the customer's home.
In the context of parcel delivery, parcel delivery services, such as UPS, typically receive packages from package senders (i.e., consignors) for delivery to intended package recipients (i.e., consignees). After receiving a particular package, a parcel delivery service will typically use a delivery scheduling system to develop a delivery route and schedule for the package. In developing the route and schedule, the scheduling system will generally implement standard logistics modeling techniques that seek, among other things, to reduce the additional distance within a delivery route that a delivery truck will need to travel to make the delivery.
In developing the delivery route and schedule, prior art systems also consider any time constraints imposed by the sender on the delivery. For example, if the sender has specified that the package must be delivered before 10:00 am on the next business day, the delivery service will schedule the package to be delivered before the 10:00 am deadline on the specified day. Thus, a delivery truck will be scheduled to make the delivery before 10:00 am, even if the delivery truck will need to travel far out of its way to make the delivery on time, and even if the package recipient is scheduled to receive other deliveries in a separate trip later in the day.
Thus, the focus of prior art systems is to assure that the package is delivered in the most cost-effective manner possible while meeting any established delivery deadline. If there is a conflict between meeting a delivery deadline and delivering the package at low-cost, the system will typically sacrifice the low-cost aspect of the delivery and schedule the package to be delivered on time.
However, because the package recipient is often unavailable to receive a package according to the delivery schedule established by the sender, it often turns out that the extra expense of delivering the package according to this schedule is not of particular value to the recipient, the sender, or the delivery service. In fact, in situations where the package delivery service can not leave the package unattended at the place of delivery, attempting to deliver the package according to the schedule specified by the sender may actually delay receipt of the package by the intended recipient. If the recipient is unavailable to receive the delivery on the delivery date established by the sender, the delivery service will typically try again to make the delivery on the following day, which delays the delivery by at least one day. Alternately, the recipient may choose to pick up the package from a delivery service branch office, which may be inconvenient for the recipient, and which may also delay delivery of the package to the recipient.
Failed deliveries are not only undesirable because they may result in untimely receipt of the package by the intended recipient, but also because they result in increased delivery costs for the parcel delivery service. A failed delivery typically makes it necessary to reschedule delivery of the package and to execute at least one additional delivery trip to deliver the package.
Even in situations where the intended recipient is available to receive the package according to the schedule specified by the sender, the intended recipient may actually have no preference about what time they receive the package on a particular day, or whether the package is delivered on the delivery date specified by the sender. For example, a busy accountant may be scheduled to receive a package by 10:00 am on a particular morning, but may not actually be available to review the contents of the package until 5:00 pm that afternoon. In addition, it may be relatively expensive for the delivery service to make the delivery by 10:00 am, but relatively inexpensive for the delivery service to make the delivery by 3:00 pm. In this case, there is no real benefit to delivering the package as part of an expensive “before 10:00 am” delivery rather than a less-expensive “before 3:00 pm” delivery.
Another example may be understood within the context of scheduling deliveries to a business that receives daily deliveries at the same time every day. Using current delivery scheduling systems, if a sender sends a package to the business and specifies that the package is to arrive before the business' regularly scheduled delivery time, the package delivery service will have to make two separate visits to the business on a particular day. In some situations, making an additional visit to the business to satisfy an early delivery deadline for a particular package may be of no value to the recipient of the package. For example, if the recipient does not need the package before the business' regularly scheduled delivery time, delivering the package before the requested delivery deadline may be of no benefit to the recipient or sender and would, therefore, not justify the additional cost associated with making the early delivery.
Accordingly, there is a need for a parcel delivery scheduling system that is configured to schedule deliveries to be made generally according to rules set forth by the consignor, but also according to the availability of the consignee to receive and use the package.
Turning to the field of grocery delivery, some modern grocery delivery services allow customers to schedule groceries to be delivered to their home within a customer-selected time window. To use these systems, customers access a Web page to first select their desired groceries and then to select an available delivery time window (generally on the following day) in which the groceries are to be delivered. The time windows are generally one-half hour or one hour long.
Algorithms for deciding which time windows are available for presentation to a customer ordering groceries vary from simply allowing a maximum number of deliveries per time window in each route area, to the cost-based time window evaluation method described in UPS pending patent application Ser. No. 09/811,375, filed Mar. 16, 2001, entitled “Variable Time Window Processing Systems and Methods”, published Oct. 10, 2002, Publication No. 2002/0147654, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,701,299, which is incorporated herein by reference. The latter method utilizes the durable Roadnet 5000 routing and scheduling program to assess the cost of delivery to a particular address in each possible time window in light of the previous delivery commitments in that route area, and does not present any time window in which the cost would be above a pre-determined threshold. UPS' publicly-available e-Roadnet product is used to interface the Roadnet 5000 program with a Web-based customer ordering interface.
Most home grocery delivery schemes have failed because they were unprofitable. The low volume of orders and unwillingness of customers to pay enough for the delivery service hurt these efforts. One difference in parcel delivery is that many parcel delivery companies (such as UPS) operate thousands of routes each day that are supported financially by the delivery volume of regular customers who have daily pickups and deliveries, although these routes include the burden of sporadic non-daily deliveries.
There is another fundamental difference between parcel delivery and home delivery of groceries. In home grocery delivery, the purchaser places the order and receives the delivery, and therefore can schedule the delivery when making the order. In parcel delivery, the purchaser of the parcel delivery service typically is a consignor who will not be the person receiving the delivery. This leads to a requirement to contact the consignee separately if there is a need to schedule delivery. Therefore, the techniques of home grocery delivery cannot be applied directly to parcel delivery services.
Accordingly, there is a need for a scheduling system that is configured to schedule services (such as the delivery of a package) to be provided generally according to rules set forth by the sender of the service (such as a consignor), but also according to the availability of the intended recipient (such as a consignee) to receive and use the service.